Let me tell you about Smaug. Now, I knew the guy a long time, a good friend, he worked with me on the Laketown deal and told me he learned a lot from watching me. You could say I invented him. By the way, people do tell me that all the time, that I am one of the great teachers. They tell me that on my hit show The Apprentice, they tell me that in life.

But Smaug, if he learned anything, he didn’t learn enough. He turned out to be a terrible investor, a real dummy, just sat on his gold. He literally sat on it! No deals, no moves. I said Smaug, you dummy, you gotta be out there making deals, negotiating, sitting down at the table, incinerating people with fire. You’re not going to make any money sitting there like a big lazy dumb rock! You’ll be small potatoes forever! But he didn’t listen and he stayed in that backwater and he got so lazy, he was such a slow moving target – I mean, come on, an illiterate redneck takes one shot at you and boom, done, gone, dead. At a Trump property, we are always on the move, we are cutting deals, the best deals, and we use gold the way it was meant to be used, on fountains, escalators, walls – all the best, and very classy, people say.

I’m the best at talking to Sauron, I really am. Tough guy, tough negotiator but you really just have to have a man-to-man. Not like the people running Gondor, they’re stupid. I mean, how stupid are they? Now, my tower – and let me tell you, it’s the biggest, classiest tower, great views of the whole ring of stone and the forest and the river – I can get him on the line. Doesn’t answer anybody else, but when I want him, here’s there. I’ll be so good at dealing with him, it’ll make your head spin.

See now Gandalf, that guy is a total failure. Very low in the polls. Can’t win Rohan, can’t win Gondor. Everywhere I go they tell me they are glad to get rid of him. How many towers has he built? He doesn’t even have his own house. Very low energy. His idea of a good hotel, you ever been to the Green Dragon? What a dump. Terrible mattresses. Good beer, you know, I give him that, I don’t drink but they tell me very good beer, but the place attracts a very bad crowd, not classy at all. Awful service. Gandalf is like – dwarves, hobbits, these guys in green smocks and stuff – I mean, I’m very open-minded, the dwarves love me, but this is who you ask to kill a dragon? You bring them in and they fight over gold, we need to make better deals and tell them to go get their own gold. Very bad deals!

And how do you lose to a Balrog? No wonder Gandalf is single. What kind of woman would want to be with Gandalf? He looks like a homeless person! Zero discipline. None! He shows up late, smokes, sends the hobbits off to do his fighting, and loses to a Balrog. Pulled off a bridge by a Balrog. Why? Zero discipline! You never turn your back on a Balrog. You have to be strong. It’s why Gandalf never wins anymore! Nobody respects a man who hangs around with circus midgets while creeping around a cave.

The Last Alliance of Men and Elves, how incompetent was that. The Elves, they’re very sharp. I know them, I have negotiated with them, I understand them, they respect me, because I have worked with them and made deals with them. Isildur was not a negotiator. The great House of Gondor, not a negotiator, none of them. That’s why they wander like losers in the woods now. The Elves are negotiators. They make deals, and they take us to the cleaners because the Men are led by losers. The Elves do not respect losers. Look at what happened the last time. “Oh no,” Elrond said, “you take the Ring, Isildur.” And Isildur, he’s a dummy — the Gondorians are dummies, all of them, their wives all tell me that, beautiful women except their country is stupid — and he takes it. What does it get him? Face down in a ditch, a very low-class waterway, filled with arrows.

Meanwhile the Elves, they’re living forever, they’re building their tree-palaces, all the jobs going to other Elves, and the Men are wearing animal skins and wondering where the Kings of the West went. Numenor was a long time ago. Very classy place, huge. Now it’s gone, and Gondor is a dump. Nothing about my properties says “Gondor.” Gondor begs me to build there, you’d be shocked, they are always asking, “Donald, when will you put a casino in Gondor?” And I tell them, look as long as you’re thinking of ANOTHER alliance with Elrond in this Third Age, no, you get no casino. Elrond wants another alliance because the last one went so well. For him, not us. For Elves, not Men. You think the sons of Denethor will make that happen? I’ll make it happen.